Tristan Wegman (center) plays on the website while his mother Vicky (left) and friend Steven Effisimo watch. Tristan Wegman of Redwood City, Calif. uses the Zamzee device to measure his exercise on a daily basis. He also checks his exercise numbers in a fun format online.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Tristan Wegman (center) plays on the website while his mother Vicky...

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Tristan Wegman shows off the Zamzee device which is so small it is hidden under his t-shirt. His friend Steven Effisimo stands in the background. Tristan Wegman of Redwood City, Calif. uses the Zamzee device to measure his exercise on a daily basis. He also checks his exercise numbers in a fun format online.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Tristan Wegman shows off the Zamzee device which is so small it is...

Image 3 of 3

"Challenges" on the Zamzee webiste can help users exercise more and even win prizes. Tristan Wegman of Redwood City, Calif. uses the Zamzee device to measure his exercise on a daily basis. He also checks his exercise numbers in a fun format online.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

"Challenges" on the Zamzee webiste can help users exercise more and...

The Redwood City company has created a plastic device that fits in a pocket or attaches to a shoe and measures physical activity. When that information is uploaded, an online program displays the child's movement throughout the day and awards points based on the level of activity.

For children whose family members have paid for incentives to reach various goals, those points translate into an online currency that can be traded for rewards. Zamzee and some nonprofits also sponsor "activity challenges" that include such rewards.

A company study found that using the device boosted activity by about 30 percent on average over the first 12 weeks - the equivalent of running an extra marathon per month.

Which sounds impressive. Indeed, some observers point to Zamzee as a model of "gamification" - the concept of applying game principles to encourage real-life behavior, like doing more exercise, motivating employees or nudging customers into buying.

But the data don't yet say how Zamzee affects behavior over the long term - and the same is true for much of gamification as it's currently being applied.

While gamification is a relatively new concept, the science of human motivation is not. And critics of the gamification concept - and even proponents who feel the concepts are misapplied - say many examples so far fundamentally misunderstand what drives behavior.

The most basic mistake is thinking that people play games for external rewards like points and badges, whereas in fact people play games because games are intrinsically fun or rewarding. The points are just a way of keeping score, an almost incidental add-on to the process. Sudoku has no points, for instance, but that hasn't stopped millions from playing.

"Actual games and gamification are at complete opposite poles on the motivation continuum," said Kathy Sierra, a writer and game developer.

This isn't a big problem when rewards and points are applied to rote work, like chores or brushing your teeth. After all, there's little worry of making those things less engaging.

But Dan Pink, the author of "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," has pointed out that studies show that when the task rises to the level of even rudimentary cognitive skills - anything above mechanical tasks - incentives start to work in reverse. Greater rewards - including higher pay - lead to poorer performance with things like creative tasks.

Losing motivation

This de-motivation flies in the face of economic theory, and yet the findings have been remarkably consistent, Pink and others say.

Another common misconception is that sparking competition - by using things like workplace leader boards to increase productivity - leads to long-term improvements. In fact, interest tends to trail off quickly, particularly for those who realize they're not in the running to win, said Jane McGonigal, a renowned game designer and author of "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World."

"It gets people excited on day one, but on day 30, not so much," she said.

Gabe Zichermann, author of "Gamification by Design," says gamification works far better than critics want to give it credit for. He noted that even "lame" or "slapdash" additions of badges and points tends to improve user experiences.

"Interactions between the vast number of services and people in the world are so quotidian that the smallest amount of surprise and delight results in better engagement," he said.

But Sierra says those gains are often fleeting - and mask the dangerous fact that the incentive-driven rewards are subconsciously pushing aside the once intrinsic ones.

"You take something that was fun on its own and now add rewards, and suddenly you get a big spike in 'engaged activity' - only the engagement has shifted to the incentive structure rather than the original thing," she said.

Practically speaking, that can mean that once companies start offering rewards for behavior, they'll never be able to remove them without diminishing the perception of the product or service. Put plainly, the user gets spoiled.

Sierra didn't address Zamzee specifically, but her point at least raises questions about the product.

If the user is a kid already inclined to play basketball, baseball, soccer and football for the intrinsic fun and challenge, is there a risk of replacing that innate desire with an expectation that physical activity should be immediately rewarded? And if so, how does that affect health and fitness motivations into their late teens and adulthood?

For sedentary children

Still, while Zamzee is designed for any kid to use, the company is targeting sedentary children, many of whom are in at-risk communities suffering from alarming rates of obesity and diabetes. So maybe these are kids who won't get off the couch at all without some kind of incentives.

"The real question for us is whether or not this approach can be effective where all others have failed," said Richard Tate, head of communications at the company. "Sedentary behavior and obesity are entrenched social problems that we haven't found a solution to. From our point of view, bringing in all possible tools and approaches seems important."

The company is in the midst of longer-term user studies.

To be sure, there are concrete examples of effectively applying gaming principles to real-world problems. Perhaps most famously, people playing a protein-folding game known as Foldit were, in three weeks, able to ascertain the structure of an enzyme that could help design drugs to fight the spread of HIV. That task had stumped scientists and computers for a decade, according to the study published last year in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

McGonigal highlighted this and other successes in what she prefers to call "game-ful design" during a discussion at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre last month.

The problem with many applications of the concept is that they begin with the notion that you can get people to do something they don't already want to do, McGonigal said in an interview. But when you apply the power of games to something they already care about, the real-world results can be surprisingly powerful.

"People engage with real challenges with the same sense of optimism and drive and self-motivation and likelihood to cooperate that they do with game challenges," she said. They become "the same version of themselves in real life as they are in games, which is typically a better version - able to stick with harder problems longer and more resilient in the face of failure."